Neil McCormick reviews the Rolling Stones's new song Doom and Gloom
from their forthcoming greatest hits album GRRR!, and finds it's
business as usual for the blues rockers.

It’s been six years since the last one, and over 20 years since the last hit, but the new Rolling Stones single sounds very, well, Stones-y. For which, I suppose, we must be grateful. At least they haven’t gone dubstep.

In defiance of advancing years and creaking bones, Doom & Gloom is an energised, uptempto blues attack built around a raw Keith Richards and Ron Wood slashing rhythm guitar riff, meshing thrillingly with a Muddy Waters style blues harp and underpinned by Charlie Watts tight and minimal backbeat. This gritty, dirty groove is topped off with one of Jagger’s shouty, one-note blues holler vocals that gets in your ear and yacks away like a headache. The frontman makes each line last several seconds beyond its natural end point, turning “road” into “ro-o-o-o-o-oa-d” and (rather impressively) “explode” into “explo-o-oa-o-o-oa-aa-deh”, overstretching syllables with a relish that would make Liam Gallagher weak at the knees.

With long verses sustained on one chord, and Jagger yelling over a familiar blues progression on the chorus, the immediate impression is not a million miles from Exile On Main Street’s basement rock. The texture of the interplay on the backing track has hints of Gimme Shelter, and the defiant aggression of the vocal touches on Street Fighting Man but the song itself never quite takes off, hammering away with the kind of heavy handed of gusto of veterans chasing the inspiration of their youth. It lacks the real juice and wayward spirit of those bygone days.

A big part of the problem is Jagger’s voice, which is (as it has been on recordings since the late Seventies) just a bit too high in the mix, too assertively dominant. Jagger has suggested this is a political song but it is the glib politics of laissez faire, a non-voter’s protest anthem. Smartly turned couplets evoke crashing aeroplanes, zombies in Louisiana, overseas war, tightening screws, mounting garbage and endless news of “doom and gloom” but the singer’s complaint is not really about the state of a deteriorating world. He’s just a bit grumpy about being subjected to all this bad news when all he really wants to do is dance. This kind of stuff might sound nihilistically charged from a street fighting 17-year-old but just sounds little bit glib from a 70-year-old.

The best bit is when he stops singing and starts blowing. There is a fantastic, swampy guitar and harmonica interlude in the middle, in which Charlie shifts to the offbeat and the band lock into a down and dirty groove. It’s a reminder of everything the Stones do so well, indeed, better than anyone else. Doom & Gloom may not be a classic single but it at least sounds like they are trying to recapture the spirit that made them the world’s greatest rock and roll band, and having fun doing so.